What Is the Introduction to Philosophy - Assignment Example

The achievements of the body, the awesome activities, and processes that a person is capable of conducting or possessing, causes one to wonder if its primary force, in describing our world, the mental aspects and physical aspects appear to be synched. The mind and body interact with each other fully in order to accomplish so many tasks that are so significant to our survival, for example, playing a simple chess game requires both thinkings and moving of the pieces, dancing requires agility and clear memorization of the steps and hops to conduct at specific parts of the song, even the act of deciding, which may be perceived to be primarily mental entails the body to affect the decision.

However, the exact point where the mind and body interact, and the process of their interaction, escapes our knowledge, cannot be scientifically quantified. It is therefore not an easy thing to explain how something immaterial (mind) interacts with the material (body). For while the physical part of the body is evident, it beats logic just how an invisible immaterial thing influences the body One is able to know his/her own mind because he/she can afford to enter into his/her inner sanctum of thought, this way, in a reflective mood one can tell clearly when he is in pain, or when sad, or even when overwhelmed by joy, but it is difficult to tell whether other people have minds, or they are just programmed robots.

While similarities in shape and size do not necessarily mean that because one is like this, the other person is the same too, the argument of analogy claims that those similarities provide us with an important hint in getting to know the mind of others, it is therefore helpful to note that since we are members of the same species and share so many similarities together, such as the response of joy with elation and loss with sorrow, we can get to know the state of others from their overall response in different occasions, setting us always as the determinants, therefore by observing the behavior of others one can infer (courtesy of the similarities) that others too have a mind.

Memory theory of personal identity is the principle that claims that memory is the key factor that enables one to persist over time, the theory argues that, in the midst of growing change and changing times that so often change us qualitatively and quantitatively, the only thing that attaches us to that person who was yesterday or twenty years ago, is the ability to recall a certain experience that that same person experienced, in the puzzle of the ship of Theseus, one cannot but agree that the ship is new since every part of it is replaced, but in a person, though much regenerates, memory stays intact, nevertheless, this theory does not hold water in cases where a person’s memory fails, either due to an accident or old age, and it may thus be assumed that, a retired teacher who has lost his memory cannot comprehend where they met and is a totally different person with the former teacher.

  Therefore, while memory helps stamp one’s identity over time irrespective of the qualitative change that has happened to him/her, it is still not an ideal determining factor to confirming our personal identity.  The intention and desire are very different but they both occur at the beginning of the event. This comes to the question when one says he desires to climb the mountain it might be he does desire to climb the mountain but is not planning or intending to climb that mountain.

The difference in this statement comes to the context that he has an interest but is not in any way planning to climb that mountain.     According to philosopher Grice, intentions are real inputs to reasoning while desire is output to reasoning, therefore, being a very important difference. The difference between desire and intention is the pro attitude to do something when having an intention while in the desire there is no plan or strategy to do something. It is, therefore, a difference that really dictates the difference between intention and desire.